Friday on MS NOW’s “Katy Tur Reports,” network host Ari Melber said the unsealed Department of Justice indictment against journalists Don Lemon was an attempt to “criminalize reporting.”
Melber said, “This indictment, among other things, attempts to criminalize reporting, criminalize asking questions, criminalize what is widely understood as journalism, even though there’s robust debate about exactly where those lines were.”
He continued, “So jumping right into it on page 11, the Justice Department under Donald Trump is claiming that one of the overt acts in furtherance of a conspiracy or crime, so that this is an element of the crime, is that, quote, Don Lemon peppered the pastor with questions, quote unquote. I practiced First Amendment law. As you know, we cover a lot of stories here, and I cover law here. I’ve never seen anything like this in the modern time. I mean, this is outrageous, baseless on the Lemon front. I’ll mention that it is part of a wider indictment. So, there are nine defendants named here together, and some of them are redacted, as mentioned. Some of them are not. Lemon is one of them. So what they’re doing is trying to take a wider case that is basically about storming this area where random citizens or people could have criminal or legal liability.
Melber added, “And we’ve covered why, but they’ve added longtime journalists into this, and they’re not hiding the ball, Katy. They’re admitting that they want to criminalize asking questions. If you wanted this case to win in the long run in court, in front of a jury, you might try to make a more narrow argument. They’re not looking to make from what I can tell — having just read this,— legal, valid arguments that might win in the long run. The country can be on notice — Asking questions is one of the things that they say is a crime, Katy. Or I should say, an element of a crime.”
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